Listen To Me (Rizzoli & Isles #13)(8)

The tamales that never got made, thought Jane. Sometimes it was small things, like tamales, that bound a neighborhood together.

“What about her cell phone, Jamal?” asked Frost. “You remember it?”

Jamal frowned. “Is that missing too?”

“Yes.”

“Weird. ’Cause it’s just some old Android she had forever. She was having trouble surfing on it, ’cause of her eyesight. That’s why she needed the laptop for her research.”

“What kind of research?”

“She was trying to track down some old newspaper articles. That’s hard to do on a little phone when your eyes aren’t good.”

Frost flipped to a new page in his notebook and kept writing. “So it was an old Android. What color?”

“I know it had a blue case with all these tropical fish on it. She liked fish.”

“Blue case with tropical fish. Okay,” said Frost and he closed the notebook. “Thank you.”

Jamal heaved out a sigh, clearly relieved the interrogation was over. Except it wasn’t. There was one more question Jane had to ask.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Jamal,” she said. “But I need to be thorough. Can you tell us where you were last night, around midnight?”

In an instant, a cloud seemed to pass over his face. With that one question, she’d just destroyed any trust they’d built with him.

“I knew it,” Mrs. Bird snapped in disgust. “Why do you want to go asking that? That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? To accuse him?”

“No, ma’am. This is a completely routine question.”

“It’s never routine. You’re looking for a reason to blame my son and he’d never hurt Sofia. He liked her. We all did.”

“I understand, but—”

“And since you want to know, I’m just gonna straight-out tell you. It was hot last night, and my boy doesn’t do well in the heat. He had a bad attack of asthma. Last thing he’d want to do is go down the street and hurt someone.”

While his mother raged, Jamal said nothing, just sat with his back rigid, his shoulders squared, maintaining his dignity in silence. Jane could not take back the question, a question she would have asked any teenage boy who lived in a neighborhood where there’d been burglaries. Who knew the victim and had been inside her house.

Her next question would be even more hurtful.

“Jamal,” she said quietly, “because you’ve been inside Sofia’s house, your fingerprints may be there. We need to exclude yours from any unidentified ones we find.”

“You want my fingerprints,” he said dully.

“It’s just so we know which ones we can discount.”

He gave a resigned sigh. “Okay. I understand.”

“An evidence technician will be here to collect them.” She looked at his mother. “Your son is not a suspect, Mrs. Bird. If anything, he’s been a very big help to us, so thank you. Thank you both.”

“Yeah.” The woman scoffed. “Sure.”

As Jane stood up to leave, Jamal asked: “What about Henry? What happens to him?”

Jane shook her head. “Henry?”

“Her fish. Sofia doesn’t have any family, so who’s gonna feed Henry?”

Jane glanced at Frost, who just shook his head. She turned back to Jamal. “What do you know about goldfish?”





In Jane’s experience, hospitals were where bad things happened. The birth of her daughter, Regina, four years ago, an event that should have been joyous, had instead been both terrifying and painful, an ordeal that had ended in blood and gunfire. This is where people come to die, she thought as she and Frost walked into Pilgrim Hospital, as they rode the elevator to the sixth-floor Surgical Intensive Care Unit. During the pandemic, when COVID-19 had swept through the city, this really had been the place where people came to die, but on this Sunday evening, an eerie calmness prevailed over the ICU. A lone unit clerk staffed the desk, where six cardiac rhythms blipped across the monitors.

“Detectives Rizzoli and Frost, Boston PD,” Jane said, showing her badge to the clerk. “We need to speak to Sofia Suarez’s colleagues. Anyone who worked with her.”

The clerk nodded. “We thought you might be coming by. I know everyone wants to talk to you.” She reached for the telephone. “And I’ll page Dr. Antrim too.”

“Dr. Antrim?”

“Our intensive care director. He should still be in the hospital.” She looked up as a nurse emerged from one of the patient cubicles. “Mary Beth, the police are here.”

At once the nurse came toward them. She was redheaded and freckled, with flecks of black mascara on her lashes. “I’m Mary Beth Neal, the charge nurse. We’re all in shock about Sofia. Have you caught who did it yet?”

“It’s early stages,” said Jane.

One by one, more nurses joined them at the unit desk, forming a circle of somber faces. Frost quickly jotted down their names: Fran Souza, a fireplug of a woman, her dark hair cropped short as a man’s. Paula Doyle, blond ponytail, lean and tanned and fit as an L.L.Bean model. Alma Aquino, huge eyeglass frames overwhelming her delicate face.

“We couldn’t believe it when we heard the news last night,” said Mary Beth. “We don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt Sofia.”